Read Online How Britain Kept Calm and Carried On by Anton Rippon - Free Book Online

on my first flight out of sight of my instructors.
    My course was a three-legged one and I completed the first two safely but, during the third leg something affected my judgement and I realized that my navigation had gone wrong. After circling
around I made a big mistake, I began to zigzag and after about two hours’ flying, with one eye on my fuel gauge, I began to wonder how much longer I could remain airborne.
    It was then that I saw, under my port wing, what was obviously an aerodrome – although not my own! Happy again, I headed into wind, made a reasonably good landing, got out and began to
saunter across to report my arrival. But it was only as I entered the building that I realized my position – an army type reporting to the RAF that I was lost.
    However, they did their best not to show me too plainly that they were amused and I was given a meal and some drinks, while arrangements were made to advise my chief instructor. Only later did I
really become embarrassed – when a plane arrived from my Flying Training School, with two pilots, one of whom was to fly me back to base.
    Alan Cox, Epsom

    The time was June 1940. I had been in the army all of two weeks, but there had been little formal training as our new Regiment ‘A’ Co, 6th Buffs [Royal East Kent
Regiment], was still being formed. So far it had been just a few days to form a platoon, then a week on the rifle range, and now we were at the former
Daily Sketch
holiday camp at
Dymchurch in Kent. On the parade ground we were taught the rudiments of standing guard and then, in pairs, our first two hours of night guard. In a field.
    The purpose was, I suppose, to watch for parachutists and I know we were keyed up for anything. The night was cloudy and, with the moon, there was a mixture of moonlight and darkness.
    Suddenly my mate said: ‘Look at those two men at the far end of the field!’
    I looked and, sure enough, there were two men bent double and creeping along beside the hedge. We both panicked a bit, I think, and tried to remember what the sergeant major had tried so hard to
teach us.
    I said: ‘What do we do?’
    ‘Challenge them!’
    ‘Who? Me?’
    ‘Yes, you know, “Halt! Who goes there?”’
    Somewhat nervously I did just that, but there was no reaction from the men. Now we were for it, I had to challenge again with the knowledge of what followed if they did not respond. They
didn’t, they just carried on with their slow advance along the hedge.
    Now, the sergeant major had stressed that if the enemy failed to respond to a third challenge then we were to open fire!
    So, at my third challenge: ‘Halt, or I fire!’ I released the safety catch, put one up the spout and, with my rifle at my shoulder, prepared to pull the trigger. It was only when
I’d actually put pressure on the trigger that the two men at last responded – with a loud ‘Moo-oo!’
    It was a black and white cow, its front and back ends split by a black patch, thus providing the ‘two crouching men’.
    The sergeant major never heard of that episode, but he did hear of the sheep that was shot on the golf links, and the man on a cycle brought down by a bayonet through his front wheel when he
failed to stop.
    R. A. Cook, Grantham

    The permanent accommodation at my flying school was limited and many of the trainee pilots were housed in tents pitched in a single line in the shadow of a high hedge.
    During what was a really hot summer, one of the trainee pilots, Lieutenant John Hemmings, used to regularly strip off and wash down with water from a canvas bucket outside his tent. One day
     a voice – an excited female voice – was heard to exclaim from the other side of the hedge: ‘There you are, I told you so! He does it every day!’
    Alan Cox, Epsom
    During a wartime army exercise, dressed as a civilian I captured a complete camp, including the commanding officer, for which I was promptly transferred to a training camp in
the north of England.
    News of my